Results tagged “fcp” from Final Cut Studio, Avid, Adobe, and Video Streaming

Creating a photo montage to the beat of music in Final Cut Pro can be much easier with a couple simple steps. The first step is to establish the beat of the music. Before doing this you will want to make sure your audio is ready for Final Cut. Once in your sequence you will want to set markers in the audio track to the beat of the music. By playing the music, and hitting the "M" key to the desired interval, you will create a template for your montage. If you have limited ability in this regard, another option is to load the audio into the Viewer, and apply the Markers visually, by looking at the wave form in the Audio Tab.

Okay, it's time to go geektoid on you!  There is a cool feature within Final Cut Pro that integrates a new feature in Mac OS 10.5.X (Leopard).  Here's how it works.

While running Final Cut Pro, navigate to the help menu and you'll see a blue search box.  Type in a specific phrase.  In this example 'mark'. Park over the list of choices and Final Cut Pro will automatically open up the appropriate menu for you and it will point to it.  Better yet, you can click on the search term and it will actually perform the function!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This is a great feature if you are an educator or trainer.  For the rest of us, it's just another geeky function.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have you ever noticed when you render motion effects in Final Cut Pro that the quality isn't always up to par? You may also notice a 'stutter effect' when zooming in and out of clip elements.

Taking a still image and giving it subtle motion is often referred to as the Ken Burns effect. Ken Burns is one of the most famous documentary film makers of all time. When faced with not having any video footage of what he was documenting Ken Burns would move across a still image, creating the illusion of camera motion. This works very well with inanimate objects like a landscape. When using this effect on people it becomes immediately obvious that the individuals are still. Nevertheless it is a classic and often used technique.

When producing a photo montage with Final Cut Pro, the Ken Burns effect is the best way I know to give your production life. This can be a very simple and systematic process. By bringing in all of your photos at once, and getting them rearranged into the desired sequence, you just go thru the images from beginning to end applying the Ken Burns effect to each one.

 

Knowing when to use Soundtrack Pro vs when to bring a sound effect directly into Final Cut Pro is an aquired skill. In most cases if you are only bringing in one to three effects,. it is easier to just bring the sound effect right into Final Cut. An great way to accomplish this is to set your Spotlight to just search for music, preview the different options in Finder, and then drag the desired effect right into Final Cut. You can drag the effect directly form Finder into your Sequence, but if you may want to bring it into the File Browser first. Soundtrack Pro is great for assembling multi track audio, but if you only need one asset from Soundtrack Pro, you may want to consider this work flow.